Historically, research on the linguistic role of intonation has been devoted
to phoneticians rather than phonologists, so that earlier work was essentially
empirical, and strongly influenced by technologies such as acoustical analysis
of speech. Later, important psycho acoustic studies allow shifting from physical
data to perceptual descriptions, which together with the use of generative
grammar axioms, lead to present dominant representation and interpretation such
as ToBI. This paper will examine the multimodal aspects of these changes where
graphical representation of sound plays a crucial role in the development of
intonation models.